


Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

by averita



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Community: got_exchange, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 12:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1347046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/averita/pseuds/averita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has held this fantasy close to her heart for years, from the first time she spoke of returning to Winterfell and watched Rhaegar’s eyes grow hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rumaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rumaan/gifts).



> Written for rumaan_1 for the most recent got_exchange on LiveJournal. The prompt was: " Rhaegar wins AU, Lyanna survives ToJ. After Lyanna pleads for his life, Ned retreats back to Winterfell where he struggles to forgive Lyanna, who is desperate for a reconciliation. Bonus points for Benjen-in-the-middle." I've written very little Lyanna before, but she's a character I love and am fascinated by, so I hope this version of her rings true enough!

Winterfell is largely unchanged, at least from a distance, and it is easy enough to close her eyes and live that well-worn fantasy in a way that she never could in the hot Dornish tower or the stuffy, perfumed rooms of the Red Keep. The saddle is soft, sturdy between her thighs, and the wind bites at her cheeks and tangles her hair like familiar fingers. Smoke and snow and everything she has longed for - it makes her feel clean again, if only for a moment.

She travels with a small party - small by royal standards, at least - but it is not for their consideration but for her son’s that she refrains from urging her horse into a run and flying through the gates the way she had so many times as a girl. Jon is a fine rider for his age, largely due to the long afternoons they have spent exploring the woods outside King’s Landing, and he has made much of the journey north astride his own pony. It has made the trip longer than she would have liked, but her heart swells to see him, sitting so seriously, glancing furtively over his shoulder to see if Ser Arthur is watching as he straightens himself and tightens his hold on the reins. An extra night or two is a small price to pay for that, Lyanna thinks.

He rode with her this morning, nestled sleepily in front of her after his initial protests, and she is glad of it now - he is wide awake and bright-eyed as they draw closer. “This is Winterfell?” he asks, in awe of a castle so unlike any that he has known, and it makes her chest tighten.

“Yes,” she tells him. “This is home.”

She has held this fantasy close to her heart for years, from the first time she spoke of returning to Winterfell and watched Rhaegar’s eyes grow hard. It had been a slow realization, fingers caressing her throat so gently that she didn’t realize that they had tightened until her breath became short and painful - she ran from the prospect of one jailor straight into the arms of another, one whose embrace was warm enough that she didn’t realize her mistake until it was far too late.

And yet, like any good prisoner, she is rewarded for good behavior. “Yes, go,” her husband had said wearily when word came of little Arya’s birth. Perhaps his time with Ned during the Greyjoy rebellion had assured him of her brother’s loyalty, or perhaps Elia had finally gotten through to him - her sweet sister-wife knows as well as anyone what it is to miss one’s home, and especially one’s brothers. Perhaps, and Lyanna thinks this is most likely, he just doesn’t care enough anymore. Whatever the reason, she finds she cares not at all.

When at last the horn is blown and the gates opened; when she finally gives in and gallops the last paces into the courtyard, leaving her men and even her son behind; when she forgets herself entirely at the sight of her brothers, Ned practically unchanged but Benjen, _oh,_ she barely recognizes him and yet he is grinning that same crooked grin - this is everything she has dreamed of since she last left these grounds too long ago, and she leaps from her horse and towards her brothers.

Ben meets her, uncaring of propriety (she is dimly aware of the people kneeling in the hard muddy earth), and when he spins her around she can’t help but think of Brandon, even as she laughs. “Stop!” she insists, clutching his arms and looking up at him when he puts her down. “Gods, Benjen, you - you’re _tall_ ,” she finally sputters.

“It’s been awhile, little Lya,” he grins. She smacks him, more instinctively than anything, and marvels at the smooth deep voice so unlike the childish chatter she remembers. Kissing his cheek quickly, and turning with the rest of the yard to acknowledge her entourage as they finally catch up, she moves to Ned and feels her heart speed up.

“Ned,” she breathes, touching his shoulder lightly. “Ned, don’t be stupid, stand up.”

He does, stiffly, and the flutters that she has ignored until now grow more frantic in her stomach. It has been easy, this long trip, to attribute them to excitement, to the fulfillment of a long-held dream, and the gods know she is well-practiced in delusion. 

But though she has accounted for Brandon’s absence, practiced saying “Lord Stark” in her head and picturing Ned rather than her father, and even brought gifts for the nieces and nephew she tries not to envy in her darker moments, she finds herself floundering when her brother – one of the men who went to war for her, and the only one to come home – kisses her hand with awful formality and says, “Your Grace.” 

It is then, with quick darting eyes as she struggles to meet Ned’s, that she gets her first true glimpse of Catelyn Tully. She is frowning slightly, lines etched in the corners of her eyes, but she dips her head in a curtsey before Lyanna can examine her further. “Your Grace,” she murmurs in echo, and though Lya’s gaze steadies on the babe she holds in one arm, it does not miss the quick brush of her hand against Ned’s.

She is lovely, as Lyanna expected, albeit strange looking in the greys and whites of the Starks. Her children, too – the ones she can see, squirming in line beside their parents – are auburn-haired and blue-eyed, and she looks instinctively back at Jon, a Stark in truth despite his name, peering shyly at his cousins from Ser Arthur’s side.

“Lady Stark,” Lyanna greets her when she trusts her voice will hold steady. “I am so glad to finally meet you. You have beautiful children.” Catelyn smiles, a true smile it seems, and allows Lyanna to kiss her cheek.

“May I present Lord Robb, my heir,” Ned says tightly, his expression as cold and unmoving as ever. She had been able to read it, once, back before he left for the Vale, and she remembers with heartbreaking clarity how he had looked in King’s Landing the one time she had seen him: lost, practically dizzy with grief and the unexpected relief and fear of having Winterfell offered to him after all. They had spoken little, Lya still half-delirious from a difficult birth and neither of them truly ready to set their feet firmly in the new world they found themselves living in.

She smiles brightly, falsely, and wonders if he can see her as she can no longer see him. “Lord Robb,” she says seriously, kneeling down, “it is an honor. May I present my son, Prince Jon?” She turns and gestures Jon over, placing a hand on his shoulder. “He is of an age with you, and as you are cousins, I think that you can dispense with the titles. Don’t you think, Lord Stark?”

“Of course,” Ned agrees. There, at last, is a glimmer of something – he looks almost shocked to see Jon, who he had met only once many years ago, back when his eyes were still cloudy and his hair thin and wispy. Even Catelyn looks surprised at just how much he has grown to resemble his uncle, and Lyanna feels that familiar swell of pride as she encourages the two boys to shake hands.

“Well, then, Robb and Jon,” she says, “I trust that you two will be good friends.” And indeed, even as she rises once more, Robb seems to take this as permission to unleash the torrent that he has clearly been holding in since she rode into the yard, and begins chattering rapidly to Jon, who looks frankly bewildered.

“And this is our daughter Sansa,” Catelyn continues, kneeling slightly to smooth a hand over the girl’s fine hair. “She has been most excited to make your acquaintance, Your Grace.” Her niece is shy, burying her face in her mother’s leg, but somehow manages a decent curtsey. “And of course our youngest, Arya. She is asleep at the moment –” she shifts the bundle in her arm slightly, glancing sideways at Ned as she does so – “and I beg your understanding that we let her remain so. I am sure you will see soon enough how little   
she likes to be woken.” 

“Lya was much the same, if I remember,” Benjen interjects. Lyanna laughs, high and bright, and hates how much she reminds herself of the ladies at court.

She has always been something of a fool, full of dreams too good to be true. As Ben offers to escort her to her rooms and Ned suggests she takes her rest – “Surely it has been a long journey, Your Grace” – before guiding his family inside without once looking back, Lyanna fixes that familiar regal smile to her face and wonders if she will ever learn to not be disappointed.

***

“Well, it could have been worse,” Catelyn says that evening, when they are finally alone.

Ned stares, unseeing, into the fire Catelyn had ordered lit. “Ned,” she demands, shrugging into her robe and coming to sit beside him. “Ned, I know it’s difficult –“

“ _You_ know?” he snaps, and immediately regrets it as she pulls back, clearly hurt. He sighs, and takes her hand. “I’m sorry. It’s just – I was not expecting it to be _so_ difficult.”

If the greeting party had been awkward, the feast had been worse, though he suspects that no one realized save himself, his siblings, and his wife. Lyanna had worn a simple grey gown and no crown, her hair long and quickly mussed as she repeatedly swept it out of her face; she could have been a maid again, his little sister not yet six-and-ten. It was so easy to imagine that each repeated shattering of that delusion – the shock of red and black hair as their sons tore down the hall, the loud laughter that could have been Brandon’s if it weren’t quite so forced and Benjen not quite so old, even the warm pressure of Catelyn’s hand on his knee – tore at him just that little bit more.

He had spoken little at dinner, relying on Cat and Ben to carry the conversation, and though Lya had been seated next to him she had not pushed. She had retired early, claiming the need to see Jon settled, and he had felt sick at how grateful he was for the excuse to be rid of her.

Catelyn leans into him now. “It is harder for her, you know,” she murmurs, which doesn’t help. “For all that has passed, she is your sister, and I know you have missed her dearly.”

She speaks the truth, little though Ned is currently inclined to admit it. Returning to Winterfell alone had been one of the hardest things he had ever done, and though he had had his brother, and his new wife and son, they were all little more than strangers to him, and the ghosts of his lost family haunted every corner. To know that one of those ghosts was alive and well, or at least well enough, down south made it that much harder to move forward. 

The ravens would come, first long missives of apology and explanation and breathtaking grief, and he found himself unable to read them. She spoke of Father and Brandon, of Rhaegar – _He is not what I thought,_ she wrote in one letter, _but nor am I who he expected, so perhaps our marriage has a foundation after all._ She spoke of Jon, and of Elia Martell and her children, and how she longed for Winterfell and hated the trappings of King’s Landing.

She never spoke of Robert, dead in her name, and that is one thing that Ned knows he will never forgive.

He did not think himself cruel in his short replies; he had never been especially verbose, in any case, and as dearly as he had loved his sister they had never been truly close, not the way she was with Brandon and Ben. To speak of things that could not change, to offer forgiveness when he still didn’t understand – no, it was easier to keep things short, cordial, with well wishes and reports of the North to pass on to her husband the king. 

Ben wrote regularly, he knew, and that reassured him. Even Catelyn struck up a correspondence, which surprised him as much as it gnawed at him; Catelyn had never said a harsh word against his sister, but Ned knew that a woman like her, who lived for her duty and her family, could never understand the selfishness of Lyanna’s decision. But Catelyn is a better person than he in many ways, and had taken pity when Lyanna had lost the second babe. “She seems lonely,” she had said upon reading Lya’s response, a sadness in her eyes that told Ned she was thinking of her own sister, and from that time on Catelyn had made a point of adding a note to any message to King’s Landing. Ned suspects that Lyanna knows far more of their daily life from Cat than from anything he has ever written.

When word came that she was traveling north Ned had spent several hours in the godswood, seeking to quiet his troubled mind, and Cat had given him his space. He had only just returned after nearly a year away, fighting a war once again, and his initial, shameful reaction had been a sudden surge of anger and fear of having his hard-won peace disrupted once more. Even Benjen, who spoke to him of Lyanna more than anyone else dared, had given him a respectful berth, something that only increased his feelings of guilt. 

Catelyn took charge of the preparations, readying the castle for the arrival of their queen, and if there were any renewed whispers or rumors they never reached his ears. Not for the first time he finds himself thinking how lucky he, and Winterfell, are to have a lady so utterly suited to the role - a lady without whom today would have been wholly unbearable, rather than just painful and awkward. 

"Thank you," he says now, slightly hoarse. "I cannot -" He pauses, and starts again. "I do not want her to feel unwelcome here."

"And she will not," Catelyn assures him, pressing a light kiss to his lips, "insomuch as I can help it, but Ned, I am not the one she came to see. Give it some time, my love, if you need it, but eventually you will have to speak with her. It will do you both good."

He suspects she is right - she usually is - but communication has never come easily to him, and he has spent too much time trying to forget the past.

***

They are meant to stay for three moons, and the time passes quickly. Robb and Jon are fast friends, and Jon gets into more mischief in the first few weeks at Winterfell than he ever has at King’s Landing. Lyanna finds herself delighted rather than disappointed, happy to see her serious son, the prince who was not so promised after all, have the chance to be a boy for once.

She spends much of her time with Benjen, who speaks of taking the black. She finds the thought strangely appealing; she could do well on the Wall, she thinks, find a family among the brothers there, the washed up and the unwanted, those seeking peace and penance. She would be more useful there than at court, she thinks ruefully, where Elia is a better queen and person than she could ever hope to be, where she has buried two daughters and condemned a son to a life he can escape no more than she can.

She doesn’t ask Ben what penance he seeks to pay, he who she confided in all those years ago. She suspects she doesn’t want to know.

Catelyn is another friend, little though they have in common. She has been kind over the years, and treats her with respect if not a little pity; as a child Lyanna was prepared to hate any Lady of Winterfell, but she finds that this southron woman is surprisingly well-suited. Lyanna takes her riding one day, through the wolfswood and beyond where Catelyn confesses to have gone before; it is the most fun she has had in years.

She asks about Ned only once, and delicately, for Catelyn may be a friend but she is nothing if not loyal to her lord husband. Indeed, she says little; “He has missed you,” she admits, “but you should speak to him, not me.”

It is not easy to give him space, but she does, for a time. Brandon had been easy – they would fight and shout and she’d hit him and storm off, and they’d be fine the next day. And she had never fought with Benjen, not truly. She wishes she could pick a fight with Ned now, but she is not a child anymore, and has learned the hard way to think before she acts.

But she is not a patient woman, either, and so when Catelyn mentions that Ned is in the godswood one especially cool morning – the skies are gray, and Catelyn sighs that she supposes she will have to get used to summer snows – she makes her way down the familiar path.

He looks like a statue, sitting before the heart tree with his head bowed, and he doesn’t move when she flops down next to him. The wind is quieter here, buffered by the thick trees that cast them in shadows.

“This is where I met him,” she finally says. “He said he’d take me away. He said he’d take me anywhere, but I ended up locked in a tower.”

Ned doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look up from whatever he sees in the reflecting pool. 

“He said I’d be a queen, but I didn’t care about that,” she continues. “I’d’ve stayed here if I could have, but everything was changing, and when he spoke – Gods, Ned, you should hear him. When he looks at you like that, looks right at you like there’s no one else in the whole world, he could say anything and you’d believe him.” She laughs mirthlessly. “Or maybe that only works on children. Because I was, you know. I thought I wasn’t but I was just a child.”

“Brandon wasn’t,” Ned says, still not looking up. “He should have known better.”

Tears prick at her eyes. “Yeah,” she breathes, a sad smile on her lips. “When did he ever know better, though?” Ned snorts – against his will, she thinks – and she shakes her head. “I didn’t even know they were dead until the war was over. I didn’t even know there was a _war_ until it was over."

“And do you know what really gets me,” she continues, looking down at her hands, “is that this whole thing started because I didn’t want to belong to anybody but myself. It wasn’t just Robert, you know.” He tenses at Robert’s name, and she feels a pang of guilt, sharper than it had been in years. “It was everyone. Father was giving me away like a prized horse, Brandon couldn’t stop talking about how he couldn’t wait for Catelyn Tully to be _his_. And he may have been your friend, but you _knew_ Robert. I don’t know who he loved, but it wasn’t me, and he’d have wanted me to be that person. Like I didn’t even exist. So what really gets me is that all I wanted was to be free to make my own life, and in the end the entire kingdom went to war over me. I couldn’t even fight.”

It is a simplistic version of events, she knows; the Mad King, the prophecy, all of those pieces that added up to the carnage that followed. But this is what Ned needs to hear, and what she finds she needs to say, the words easy on her lips.

When Ned finally raises his head, his expression is open to her for the first time in years, and painfully raw. “You didn’t even love him?” he asks quietly. “I had hoped that you did.”

A tear drops from her eyelashes at the same time the first snowflakes begin to dust the ground around them. “I thought I could,” she admits, “but no. We were just using each other. I guess neither of us got what we wanted.” _It was all for nothing_ , she doesn’t say, but she knows he hears it nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes glassy, and she begins weeping in earnest when he seems to melt all at once and pulls her into an embrace.

***

Ned holds her for a long time. It is easier here, in the godswood, to see his sister as he remembers her – just the two of them, in a place that is special to them in a way that his wife and children, his new family, do not yet and may never understand. It is easier here, without the constant activity of the castle, the masks they both wear and the roles that they play, to see her not as his sister or his queen, a child or a mother, but as a new woman entirely who is all of those things.

And suddenly it makes sense just why he couldn’t bear to look at her – the only way he has survived this long, the only way he could be happy in Winterfell again, was to divide the past and the present sharply in two. Catelyn as Brandon’s betrothed and Catelyn as his wife; his siblings and his children; Ben the young boy and Ben the grown man. And now there is Lyanna, past and present in one person, and it has upset the delicate, hard-fought balance of his happy life.

But she is his sister, and she is alive, and he has not seen her in a very long time. He doesn’t think he really saw her until she walked into the godswood.

Lya has never truly fit any of the boxes they tried to put her in. She had the wolf blood, they said, the daughter of Winterfell who dressed and rode and fought like a man, the she-wolf who wept at a sweet song and ran away with a prince. Of course she wouldn’t fit into the neat confines of his new life, not without some rearranging.

“I miss you,” she whispers into his cloak, over and over again. “Gods, I miss you.”

“I’ve missed you too,” he says thickly, and tightens his arm around her.

He has fought one war for her. For his sake as much as hers, he hopes he can do this little bit more.


End file.
